api-first
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Dan Woods
Dan Woods is the Founder and CEO of Socotra, the AI-native cloud-native insurance core platform he built from scratch starting in 2014. A Stanford AI researcher and former Palantir engineer (employee #20), he left the data-intelligence world to fix insurance technology - an industry he describes as 'a decade behind banking.' Under his leadership, Socotra has raised $87M+ in total funding including a $50M Series C led by Insight Partners, and powers carriers and insurtech MGAs who can now launch insurance products in weeks instead of years.
Woodrow Levin
Woodrow 'Woody' Levin is the founder and CEO of Extend, a San Francisco company that built an API-first platform letting online merchants offer extended warranties, product protection, shipping protection and post-purchase solutions. Often described as 'AppleCare for everything else,' Extend raised a $260M Series C led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 in 2021 at a valuation above $1.6 billion. A serial entrepreneur, Levin previously founded BringIt (acquired by International Game Technology), Estate Assist (acquired by DocuSign, where he became VP of Growth), and the crypto asset fund 3.0 Capital. He also sits on the board of DraftKings.
Zack Kanter
Zack Kanter is the founder and CEO of Stedi, an API-first, cloud-native healthcare clearinghouse that routes eligibility checks, claims, and electronic payments between providers and insurers. He started his first company at 16, building a bootstrapped auto-parts wholesaler (Proforged) that he ran for roughly 13 years before selling it to Huron Capital. He then spent years wrestling with electronic data interchange (EDI), the arcane plumbing of business-to-business transactions, rewriting Stedi's codebase about eight times before finding extraordinary traction in healthcare. Along the way he became widely read for essays like 'Why Amazon is eating the world.' In March 2026 Stedi raised a $50M Series C led by Addition, bringing total funding to about $142M.
Malte Rau
Malte Rau is the Berlin-based CEO and co-founder of Pliant, a B2B fintech that lets companies and banks issue physical and virtual credit cards and plug the resulting data straight into their finance stacks. A former risk manager and fintech investor, he founded Pliant in February 2020 with Fabian Terner and has grown it into a modular, API-first card-issuing platform serving thousands of European businesses. In April 2025 the company closed a $40 million Series B led by Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest to fund its expansion into the United States.
Jason Auh
Jason Auh is Head of Sales and Customer Success at Sensible, the San Francisco developer platform that turns messy documents into structured, schema-validated data through its SenseML configuration language. A Dartmouth graduate who came up through enterprise sales at NetBase Quid, Jason sits at the seam between the engineering that builds Sensible and the customers who bet their workflows on it - and he writes candidly about where document AI actually breaks in production, not just in the demo.
Anshul Rathi
Anshul Rathi is the founder and CEO of CertifyOS (Certify), a New York-based healthcare provider data platform that credentials clinicians in under two minutes using six data elements instead of 40-page forms. An engineer by training, he spent roughly six years as one of Oscar Health's earliest employees building its provider network and data infrastructure before leaving to attack the same problem industry-wide. CertifyOS takes an API-first, data-first, automation-first approach to making provider data a single source of truth across U.S. healthcare. The company raised a $40M Series B in June 2025, bringing total funding to about $69M.
Roy Mill
Roy Mill is the Co-Founder and CEO of Joshu, a no-code insurance product platform that lets carriers and MGAs launch digital distribution channels in weeks rather than years. A Stanford PhD economist who pivoted into product, he spent years at Ancestry and At-Bay before founding Joshu in 2020. The company has raised $11.7M in total funding and was named to the InsurTech100 list in 2024.
Dustin Yoder
Dustin Yoder is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sureify, a San Jose-based insurtech SaaS company that builds a low-code, cloud-native platform helping life insurance and annuity carriers digitize their sales, service, and engagement operations. With roots in the insurance industry through his family's Silicon Valley brokerage, Yoder entered insurtech in 2012, making him one of the earliest pioneers in the space. Under his leadership, Sureify has grown to serve marquee carriers including State Farm, Allstate, Nationwide, and Principal, reaching $38.9M in annual revenue by 2024 after raising $25M+ in total funding including a $15M Series C from Aspen Capital Group in 2021.
Kurt Ruppel
Kurt Ruppel is the Co-Founder and CTO of Middesk, the business identity platform that helps financial institutions, fintechs, and marketplaces verify and onboard businesses in seconds rather than weeks. A UC Berkeley cognitive science alumnus turned engineer, he built his technical chops at Zendesk and Checkr before co-founding Middesk with Kyle Mack in 2018. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, secured a $4M seed led by Accel and Sequoia before Demo Day ended, and raised a $57M Series B in 2022—bringing total funding to over $77M. Ruppel leads Middesk's technical vision, focusing on primitives and forward concepts that transform raw business data into actionable intelligence for the financial ecosystem.
Amy Saper
Amy Saper is a General Partner at Uncork Capital, the San Francisco seed firm where she backs AI-enabled B2B, developer tools, API-first infrastructure, and fintech founders. Before investing, she shipped product at Twitter, Uber, and Stripe; before Uncork, she spent four years as an early-stage partner at Accel, leading checks into Gamma, Sprinter Health, Beam, and Complete.
Grace Chang
Grace Chang is the Taiwanese-American founder and CEO of Kintsugi, the Berkeley-based startup that built AI capable of detecting clinical depression and anxiety from just 20 seconds of free-form speech. A five-time entrepreneur with roots in signal processing and consumer tech, she raised $28 million, launched Japan's default mental health screener, and built the world's largest annotated voice dataset for mental health machine learning - before making all of Kintsugi's research and technology open source in early 2026 after FDA regulatory hurdles made the venture-backed model unsustainable.